"A slice of people's lives." - selling real estate

Nation's Business, Oct, 1988 by Martha I. Finney

"A Slice Of People's Lives" Janet Jones is 48, married for a second time and the mother of two daughters in their early 20s. Her story begins like one that many Southern women of her generation could tell:

"I grew up in a very, very loving home; I had the warmest, most loving mother and dad. I grew up being told by my parents every day that I was a wonderful, worthwhile person. I think I grew up with a lot of warm feelings for people in general. I also had a strong daddy who felt that women should be taken care of. So I grew up with kind of a `dumb act,' too, because I knew that if I played helpless, somebody else would take care of me. I went from a father who took care of everything to a husband who took care of everything."

She did not contemplate a career: "In my home, as I grew up, there were only a couple of things that my father thought it was appropriate for a young lady to do. One was to teach school, and the other was to stay home. My daughters have all kinds of ideas of what they want to do with their lives; I didn't. I was a junior in college; I didn't have a major, and my parents made me take education courses. They said, `You might want to teach some day.' I didn't plan to."

But then Jones' life took some turns that few women who grew up in Arkansas in the 1940s and 1950s were prepared for. First, she went through a divorce that left her, when she was in her mid-30s, with two young children to support. Then, in 1974, she took her first real job, selling for a Little Rock real-estate agency. By the time that agency broke up, 5 1/2 years later, Jones was selling more than $5 million worth of residential property a year.

She started her own agency, the Janet Jones Company, in 1980. Now it is one of the strongest agencies in Little Rock's most prestigious neighborhoods, with sales that Jones expects to reach $30 million this year. That is an impressive figure for Little Rock, where the median sales price for an existing home in the past 12 months was only $75,000 (far below the $180,000 or more in New York, Boston and parts of California).

After her divorce, Jones started thinking about pursuing a career. "I was growing, gaining some confidence and ready to step out, whereas I hadn't been a few years earlier. I was at a party, and this cute girl said to me: `Oh, you ought to come sell real estate. We're all having so much fun. We don't work very hard, and we make lots of money.' I thought, gosh, maybe I could do that, too."

Once Jones went to work in real estate, it turned out that her upbringing had masked a fierce drive to succeed. "People used to call me a workaholic," she says. "Sometimes some of the people who worked with me would say, `How come you have all these prospects, and I don't?' I would say, `I choose to work, and you choose to play tennis.' I had an insatiable appetite to call all the people and sell all the houses and stir up all the business.

"For instance, a new house would come on the market, and it would be 5:30, and everybody else would go home, and I'd say, `Ah! A new house! And I'd start looking through my book for who'd want this new house, and I'd call them all. Everybody else would get to the office the next morning, to get ready to start calling their people, and I'd already sold the house."

For her, she says, being raised as a typical Southern girl made it easier, not more difficult, to succeed in business: "I spent all my life wanting people to like me, and wanting to be nice to people so they would like me. That translated really well into a commission-sales business."

In residential real estate, "you're helping people in a very important, intense time in their lives," Jones says. It can be "a very happy time--it may be a marriage, a new baby, a promotion, a new job, moving up or finally fulfilling a dream they've always had to have a certain type of home for their family. On the other hand, it may be a sad time, when someone has died, or it may be a divorce, a lost job or bankruptcy. There are very few of these situations that don't have a lot of emotion in them, one way or another. I enjoy that. I enjoy having a slice of people's lives."

Jones now has 20 agents. Competing agencies have many more, but Jones has about as many as she wants because, she says, "I want to feel that a potential buyer or seller gets the same kind of quality, caring service from us no matter what agent [that client] gets." She adds, I think if we get a lot bigger, I'm not going to have as much awareness of what these agents are doing."

Her more predictable life now is a change from the days when "I had stirred up so much business, my phone rang off the wall. I couldn't eat a meal, I couldn't go to sleep, I couldn't sleep in the morning, because I had called so many people and had listed so many homes for sale.

"I had to be able to jump and run."

Running out to meet a client was harder when her daughters were younger, she says, but "my children were very supportive; they would go with me. I used to take them to school, and they'd get out of the car and say, `Sell a house today, Mom! And when I'd pick them up, they'd say, `Did you sell a house?' I'd let them put the `sold' stickers on our houses. It still makes me sad some days, because they tell me that I'd call and say I'd be home in 30 minutes, and they would laugh, because they knew that meant an hour and a half.